This weekend
I suppose that I should give bi-monthly updates to things like my New Years' Resolutions to keep me on track, or at least write down what I've accomplished. And oh boy has the past week or so been quite the roller coaster ride, as I plan my next move. The first of my goals was to make three reviews a month, and it looks like we're doing good so far. I'm a review and a half in, at half a month, so that is perfectly on schedule. Speaking of that, because I have an editor, it's really making me think about some of the bigger projects that I want to do. I'm trying to crack into It's Such a Beautiful Day, but it's a very hard movie to review in any regard. The best way to describe it is that it's a movie entirely made of nonsequiters. "Bill took his new medication, walked home, and masturbated for seven hours." It makes just as much sense in context. And then there's "THE PIPE IS LEAKING. THE PIPE IS LEAKING. THE PIPE IS LEAKING." Meanwhile, this is mixed in with moments like Bill finding someone has written "I love you" in the sand on the beach. Also, it's a story about the acceptance and denial of one's own mortality, so that's a bit hard to talk about. I don't know know... really what exactly to say about it, except that it's much better than the last abstract animated art film made almost entirely by one guy that consists of three short films than I took a look at. Cinematronic's Alice in Wonderland might be awhile, because of everything that I plan on putting into it. And then there's Animal Crossing: The Movie, which is probably going to require me to capture footage from the game, even though I still think that Wild World - the game it's based on - is the most outdated and worst in the Animal Crossing series. These bigger reviews I'm planning on making passion projects, which means that I'm likely the one who is going to be editing them specifically. But hey, that's three movies right there; four with the Emoji movie. I'll also be doing the editing for any video game reviews that I do, because I wouldn't want to make someone else delve into 40+ hours of footage for one scene. A television episode only goes up to 24 minutes; a movie, only a couple of hours. Speaking of that, I started recording footage from Stardew Valley. I don't know if anything is going to come of it, but if there's another game that I'm going to review, it's going to be Stardew Valley. I said that Morrowind ''was my favorite video game of all time, but that was before ''Stardew Valley ''was invented. I think that I can consider ''Stardew Valley my favorite game of all time. It's like Recettear in that it feels like it was a game made specifically for me, and it made me feel ways that a new game hadn't made me feel in quite awhile. It gives it a sense of nostalgia beyond it's pixel graphics because there always feels like more to discover, even more so since the game was updated. The only Harvest Moon game I'd played before Stardew Valley was It's a Wonderful Life, which I didn't really like. They called literally two streets with like... three buildings a town, and it had a high emphasis on story, while making you wait in-game years to get to the next point of the story. But I did enjoy games similar to Harvest Moon, like Haven and Hearth, and working to getting something efficient, like most simulation games, has really appealed to me. It reminds me a lot of other games that have become my favorites too. With all of the achievements and collections, it gives me the "gotta collect them all" feeling that I've gotten from Pokemon and Animal Crossing. Unlike Animal Crossing though, I really feel for these villagers (and they don't decide to move in literally right in front of my house). Actually, the villagers in Stardew Valley remind me more of Majora's Mask than any other game that I've played, because these characters have a lot of depth that you don't find in many games. It starts simple enough - things like Clint having a crush on Emily, but is too shy to approach her; Linus is a weird homeless guy who thinks that no one likes him. Then you start really learning about these characters as you get to know about them - Shane feels trapped and like he's not going to amount to anything; Pierre believes that his daughter Aggie might not even be his - and there's evidence of that actually in game. In year two, you met Kent, who is a war veteran with PTSD. And apparently now, if you don't like having kids you can talk to a witch and have them turned into doves. It costs one of the rarest items of the game, but it allows you to have kids with someone else, as if they never existed. Also, like in Majora's Mask, you can't make everybody happy. Most of the bachelors/bachelorettes are in a terrible life situation, the only way out of it is for them to marry you, and you can only be married to one person at a time. Actually, I hope ConcernedApe edits that in a future update. And yeah, if I do continue my video game reviews, I will be spoiling things. But seriously, why is no one talking about this dove thing? Considering the item you need to give the witch is a "perfect" gift for almost everyone else in the town, you could easily write a creepypasta around that. --- As for now, I'm trying to find 90's Admirable Animation or two. I don't want to just do a straight up best cartoons of the 90's list. I might do a Top 10 Underrated Cartoons from the 90's, filled with things like Cadillacs and Dinoasaurs, Fox's Peter Pan and the Pirates, or the Back to the Future Cartoon. If you're wondering what the atrocities after Hammerman are, one of them is definitely going to be Schnookums and Meat. I also bought a Prostars ''DVD and a DVD of ''Wish Kid. ''It would also be a good time to take on ''The Brothers Flub. ''Yeah, I'm probably going to put ''The Choices on the backburner for awhile, as I tackle shows that I haven't really talked about yet. ----- The other on-going goal - the learning to draw/365 days of drawing is coming along quite nicely. I've gone through 16 daily sketches and I have made drawings that I'm at least willing to show other people. Right now I think that I've really got to practice with hands. Even a cartoon sense of hands is hard for me to grasp. Well, hands and feet. Those are both annoying as hell. But, I've drawn an idea sheet for April and Molly and a four-year-old Sally. Maybe if I could get better in the next few months, I'll go back and actually turn them into concept art. Already, I'm planning on doing something a little bit extra special with the sketches. Maybe on the last day of the month, I'll create a second shape where I redraw one of everything that I've done in the previous month, like my doodles sheet. One thing that I'm having trouble in doing is drawing beyond my own typical interests. That's what this pictionary practice was about - so I don't just end up drawing pages of Sally's face day after day. I hear from people that I'm getting better, although I think what I've produced has been up and down. I do really like the 4-year-old Sally drawing, all except for those goddamn hands. Another thing that I want to draw is title cards for my videos. Still not quite there yet, though. ----- This brings us to Growing Around. I haven't made very much progress. I've written and published what should be the script for the pilot. While it still needs some spit and polish, it should at least help direct people in making backgrounds, storyboards, etc. But there are things that I need to do before then. I need to get a finalized design of each of the characters, and alter some things that didn't gel well with the story. For Sally, we're probably going to have her how Meghan drew her on the front of the book. Growing Around Final Cover w credits JUST COVER, which is so much easier to draw. But that still leaves issues with other characters. Robert is and always has been the hardest character to draw because of his weird hair. It's almost impossible to not make it look 2D. Steve and Larry still need designs, just period. I've got an idea for Melissa - Talula's secretary/assistant, but I still need to go through some designs. And some of the artists have had trouble with Timmy and Linda's highlights. It's important for them to have those highlights for story purposes - it's their established thing - but I do believe it could be made easier. And then there's the Dunn's house/the general architecture. It was drawn before the general concept was fully realized, so that needs to be changed a bit. Some of the descriptions... don't allow the house to look as it is - Sally's room is on the second floor, but it's also twenty feet tall. The second floor's rooms are all surrounding a circular center. There's a skylight in the kitchen. What I was thinking is making it look like a small castle, or making it look like a pile of those children's blocks: www.amazon.com/Melissa-Doug-Wo… The school kind of is based on a castle, although it's outside architecture was more based on what you would find in a miniature golf course. Either way, the Dunn house being castle-ish would be consistent. For instance, what's Sally's room on the inside could be a tower on the outside. Same with the attic. As for writing, there are two things that I need to do. I need to improve the pilot script with more and more detail, which is hard when details continue to be established. For instance, I didn't visualize crosswalks as hopscotch boards until earlier this week. And there are other ideas that I want to play with, that I might be able to fit in. The other thing I need to do is write up a short film/advertisement, which I'm having trouble doing. I'm thinking about going the right of having Sally introduce herself and her world, directly. I think that most cartoons do that, or at least used to. If you could point me to some advertisements for "upcoming cartoons" I'd really like to see them. And by that, I don't mean cartoons that are currently coming out. I mean advertisements that came out before their cartoon did to build up hype for its premiere. I'm also probably going to still be writing scripts. They're not the most important things in the world, but... this allows me to explore scenarios and characters, and learn things about them. It helps me see how ideas work on a small scale, and who knows, they might connect into the sequel novel - even though the books and the animations are undoubtedly going to have separate continuities, obviously. ---- Writing something new... well, I've gotten options and I've gotten ideas. One of my ideas skirts the line of cheating. My idea was taking Alone Together and changing it from script to novel, comedy to drama, make it hard and realistic with generally the same characters and the same issues. But, I decided that I want to go totally new to me. Maybe it's an idea I've thought of before, but I never did anything with it. And I managed to come up with a bunch of ideas, but two main ones. The first one is a horror story. There's a family of three - father, mother, and little girl. Then one day, the little girl decides she wants to kill her parents. And of course, no one believes the parents that this is going on because why would they? Honestly, depending on how you want to do it, this could either be a comedy or a horror or both. Despite being polar opposites horror and comedy seem to go together very well. The second one is... hard to describe. It's called The Director, and it's about a man who is already dead. In a figurative sense. The titular director used to make fantastic films that really resonated with audiences, but over time they seem to have gotten more pretentious and full of themselves and audiences rejected them more and more. This spirals him into more and more problems. He doesn't know the difference between what made his good films good and what made the bad ones bad. But, the stresses of being branded cinematic poison has made it harder and harder for him to make something good. It ends up driving him away from the people that he knows. This leads to him to start working through his problems in his art, which is a problem when the people he knows can see that their dirty laundry is out there for all to see, even if no one sees it. It's probably going to be highly meta, because I tend to write through my own problems as a means of therapy, and this is probably going to have themes of death and existentialism and creative frustration. I just don't know if I'm ready to make something so... elaborate. What do you think? About any of this. Category:Miscellaneous